Documentation service

Medijateka
The documentation service of National Museum Zadar was founded in 2000 for the purpose of organizing and planning the tasks of documentation for all the museum departments. This pertains to keeping track and analyzing the holdings of secondary documentation (documentation collections).

The aim was to establish secondary documentation holdings which the museum did not previously possess and which are essential for providing information about the activities of the museum through history.
The creation of documentation collections began through the systematic monitoring and documenting of the exhibiting and publishing activities of the museum, by collecting articles from print and electronic media in which the museum is mentioned, by recording events within the museum, by keeping track of its personnel through the centuries and by recording the users of the museum documentation. Thus was produced a corpus of documentation material which has been physically stored in the service; since 2002 the museum documentation data is also stored in computers.
In 2005 the M++ i S++, integrated museum program for the processing of primary and secondary documentation was accepted which enabled the virtual unification of the museum holdings and the bringing together of primary and secondary documentation.

Data from the existing documentation collections in Access were transferred into the new base S++, and the recording of the holdings of the photograph and media libraries got under way (evidence CD and DVD media). The establishment of a collection of posters and the associated base is planned for the future.
The documentation service digitilizes the existing classically recorded photographic material; photographs all the important events in the museum; digitilizes and stores newspaper material. It also creates archives and digitilizes documents pertaining to the history of the departments (and former independent museums), documents pertaining to collections and other happenings.

From this the role of the documentation service as a link between the primary professional-scientific data concerning museum objects and other museum activities becomes evident. In that sense, the status of the documentation service (as well as the future library, pedagogical and restoration services within the planned Heritage Museum) has to be perceived as a distinct Department of documentation.